She’s the Investor Guru for Online Creators Li Jin, 31, began backing creators years ago. She has raised her own fund to invest in influencer-related start-ups. ...... If there is such a thing as an It Girl in venture capital these days, Ms. Jin, 31, would fill the bill. ....... A Harvard graduate who was inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Ms. Jin is also aggressively pro-worker. She has made it clear in podcasts and her Substack newsletter that creators should get the same rights as other workers. Among the ideas she has championed is a “universal creative income,” which would guarantee creators a base amount of money to live on. ........ Marina Mogilko, 31, a YouTube creator in Los Altos, Calif., said Ms. Jin “started the whole creator economy movement in Silicon Valley.” ........ “She was talking about the creator economy years and years and years before anyone else was,” said Jack Conte, a co-founder and the chief executive of Patreon, a crowdfunding site for content creators. “She really sees the future before other people do.” .......... Ms. Jin posts frequently on her Substack newsletter, leads an online course teaching creators how to invest in start-ups and has created Side Hustle Stack, a free resource to help influencers find and evaluate platforms to leverage........ Ms. Jin, who was born in Beijing, immigrated at age 6 with her family to the United States, where her father pursued a doctorate in economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Their early years in the country were lean, she said, until her father left school and got a job. ....... At Harvard, she studied English and continued her creative pursuits. But at the urging of her family, who she said “wanted financial security for me,” Ms. Jin switched her major to statistics and did banking and corporate marketing internships. After briefly working for Capital One after college, she moved to Silicon Valley at age 23 to work at Shopkick, a shopping rewards app, as a product manager. ....... In 2016, Ms. Jin landed at the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. At the time, the firm was focused heavily on investing in marketplaces like Airbnb and Rappi, the Instacart of Latin America. ...... Ms. Jin became fascinated with how different marketplaces worked and wrote prolifically about them for the Andreessen Horowitz blog. She also began thinking about how different marketplace systems could evolve to help people build businesses on the internet. ....... “Her being at that big storied firm and saying these things felt like, ahh, finally someone’s saying it,” said Mr. Green, the YouTube star. ........ “I realized I had an opportunity to start an entirely new fund that was devoted to this thesis and that would be on the forefront of evolving the nature of labor and work on the internet.” ........ In May 2020, she quit Andreessen Horowitz and started Atelier Ventures. She has since invested in creator-related start-ups such as PearPop, which lets influencers profit off their social interactions, and Stir, which helps creators manage their finances. She is one of the few investors whom large influencers know by name.
......... Ms. Jin has also publicly criticized the funds that YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat offer influencers to make content for their platforms. She has implored the tech industry to “stop celebrating” the funds, calling them “bread and circuses,” and argued that creators needed ownership over the platforms that made money off them. ......... She has named a podcast that she co-hosts “Means of Creation,” a play on Marx’s means of production. ...... Her views have made her a subject of fascination in the tech industry and in leftist political spaces. ........ “There’s been a simmering awareness for my entire life,” she said, “that the world is unfair and we need to push it in the direction of justice and fairness.” ......... Since starting Atelier Ventures, Ms. Jin has moved away from Silicon Valley and run her fund out of her childhood bedroom in Pittsburgh. This summer, she was nomadic, traveling around the world surrounded by a changing cast of internet stars, artists, Gen Z tech founders and crypto pioneers.
New digital platforms enable forms of work we’ve never seen before
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What will happen to cryptocurrency in the 2020s
What happened in crypto over the last decade
DISCUSSING THE IMPACT OF BIDEN'S EXECUTIVE ORDER ON CRYPTO In this episode of "Bitcoin Bottom Line," the hosts and guest discuss the potential impact on Joe Biden's crypto-related executive order. .
Mobile is the Future of Voting – Nimit Sawhney, CEO, Voatz
BITCOIN CAN BE THE FOUNDATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS The bad guys can’t stop Bitcoin, but Bitcoin can stop the bad guys. ....... 60 years ago, it was not Syrians, Afghans, Iranians and people from various African states who had to leave their homes and sought refuge. It was Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Russians and Germans who needed a new home before, during and after World War II. Displaced by an occupying power, by the ruling government and by hunger and war. ...... Reading these 30 articles, it becomes clear that the potential bad guy is often seen on the side of the state or government. ........ Bitcoin separates money from authorities. Bitcoin cannot be steered, created, destroyed or controlled in anyone's favor. Bitcoin is independent, antifragile, democratic and secure. ......... Proof-of-work makes Bitcoin the only independent cryptocurrency.
.......... 2.2 billion people are unbanked or underserved financially. ....... Bitcoin is the fulfillment of the desire for sound money. It exists. Compared to all other articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there is almost no need to fight for this right. It is unstoppable! .
BITCOIN IS A MONETARY SYSTEM OF INTEGRITY Many of the failings we see in society today are a result of the values of fiat money being absorbed. ........ each individual is incentivized to seek the greatest fiat returns for their individual words and actions, as all are stuck on the fiat flywheel – all struggling to simply remain afloat amongst a sea of debt. ......... Integrity, the most important of all values, as none of the above virtues carry weight if integrity is found lacking, or inconsistent. Integrity encapsulates the basis for which an individual’s words and actions are deemed worthy of trust. ....... A society’s functionings (and provided incentives), when based upon a currency that is solely rooted in a lack of integrity such as a fiat currency, produce a citizenry that ultimately adopts the values of the currency itself. .
WHY THE PROPOSED EU BITCOIN BAN WOULD HAVE BEEN A MISTAKE The proposal, while shot down, is an example of growing misdirection in regulatory stances. .... You might not trust me, because Bitcoiners are all far-right drug-dealing gamblers that are environmentally bankrupting the planet as a hobby, according to the media. Let me tell you that I’m opposed to all of these things and yet spend the majority of my time educating others about the positive impact Bitcoin can have (and already has had) on the world. The good part is that you don’t have to trust me. .
